June | 2014 | The Visionary Film Fanatic

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Much can be said, and has been, about Christopher Nolan’s Inception. I may be a little late to the game but I would like to voice my opinion about such an incredible and thought-provoking film. With Inception you are transported to the world of the dream and the concept of entering the dreamt manipulate the person that is dreaming, originally conceived to be a horror movie but Christopher Nolan changed it up before production began. With a premise like that it would have been tough movie to bring to life but Christopher Nolan, who is known for making movie on such a level, is able to elevate the concept of the movie and create something that is an extraordinary movie that makes the audience think and invest their time in a deep thought-provoking way. Not many movies have had the same effect on me like Inception did, it was a well put together film that, during my first viewing, was mind-blowing. After many viewings the realization that there was more to the movie than what I had perceived. Was the entire movie a dream? Did the top fall at the end or was that what we were meant to believe? Like most movies it is totally open to interpretation and not everyone will thin the same as I do, which is what Christopher Nolan set out to do i the first place and I applaud him for making the movie the way that he did and that he has become one of Hollywood’s best directors working today.

In the future, the military designs the ability to transport people in the dream space, created as training mechanism. Extractors, otherwise known as thieves, use it to acquire secrets that were otherwise impossible to obtain. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), regarded as the best extractor but is haunted by the death of his wife and was forced to on the run, because the government believes he killed his wife, is hired by Mr Saito (Ken Watanabe) to plant an idea, regarded as inception hence the title, into Robert Michael Fischer (Cillian Murphy) , the son of a wealthy businessman, to break up his vast energy conglomerate so he can have it all to himself, Saito not Fischer. Dom enlists the best architect Ariadne (Ellen Page), chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao), forger Eames (Tom Hardy), and the pointman and close friend Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Everything turns dangerous when things don’t go according to plan, causing the dream to become a difficult venture, and Dom’s haunted past comes back to him and causes their own difficulties along the way.

When I originally saw this movie in the summer of 2010 I was completely awed by what I saw and just had to see it again and so I did, and since then it has been one of my favorite movies of all time. First off the movie completely redefined the mind-bending movie by connecting it with the heist and science fiction genre, even though science fiction can be mind-bending the majority of the time. Like all good mind bending films, this one makes you question what is reality or imagination, similar to Total Recall, The Matrix, and World on a Wire, and the answer is never clear to the audience, which, makes the think and spend time questioning what is going on. With people the solution is never the same, it all relies on how the person perceived the film, with Christopher Nolan not disclosing any information on the ending what so ever, which is a good thing because it would ruin the integrity of the movie. What Christopher Nolan did is simply incredible, to say the least, he used top-notch special effects to convey the world of the dream and created something that will live on though the genius storytelling and the a plot that never stop turning no matter the situation. It is a movie that needs to be handled with patience, only if you are trying to analysis it, to understand just what route he intended on taking. The ending is one of the most talked about scene of the entire movie, it was a clever way of handling it since it can neither confirm nor deny whether it is a dream or not, and everyone has their own opinions on it and I think that it relies totally on the viewer to decide on what it means but I think that the ending means something completely different from the movie itself.

The ending can easily be interpreted many ways, did the top stop spinning or did it keep join but, honestly it can go either way. I, think that it is all just a dream because throughout the entire movie there are slight signs that may hint at it being a dream entirely but the ending is more of a character moment than anything, it shows that Cobb doesn’t care if he is dreaming or not, hence him walking away from the top while it is spinning something that he doesn’t do at any other moment in the movie, he finally receives the one thing that he has been striving for, to see his children again and move on from the fact that his wife killed herself and that he has been on the run since then. To the character it doesn’t matter but to the viewer may feel differently, I know I do. Like all good science fiction films that are rooted in philosophy, such as Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, or pretty much anything that has been written by the author Philip K. Dick, who I feel is a big influence to the film and Christopher Nolan. This is where the difference lays, people will many different meanings for the movie and interpret it in many ways, which is all good but there is usually never a right answer, while the ending itself is just the final arch in the development of Dom Cobb, he is happy and has fulfilled his goals, be it a dream or not. Though I have my set beliefs about the film and it’s ending, I think that the ending accomplished what it set out to do, end the story arch of the main protagonist, and it completes the movie in a whole and satisfying way, any other ending I don’t think would have worked on the same level as this one.

It is difficult to come to a rational and logical conclusion about the movie, I personally think that it is all a dream and there are many indicators that it may be a dream that I noticed not to long ago while watching the movie. First of all will be the totems, which are not always as a reliable indicator, as the movie makes them out to be, about the state of the dreamer. It is said during the movie that totems provide the means to indicator whether the dreamer is dreaming or not but you tell or show another dream how the totems works you destroy the integrity of the totem and compromise its power to deduce the state of the dreamer and they may not be able to indicate whether what they are experiencing is a dream or it is real to them. At one point in the movie Dom reveals to Ariadne the purpose of his totem, how in the dream state the top will keep spinning and if the he is in reality the top will fall over, and that it originally didn’t belong to him but instead to his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). If I am to believe that totems are supposed to work then these two reasons would ruin the ability for him since the totem’s powers were revealed to a fellow dreamer. To me I don’t think this is a reliable indicator to what Dom is actually perceiving. I don’t know if this is a flaw in the film or a device that Chris Nolan set up to make people, such as myself, question what is truly going on, which is another reason I think it is such a great movie because it is constantly deceiving the audience.

Christopher Nolan has created a spectacle that is completely different from any other blockbuster that has come out in recent years. Everything from the cinematography to the sound is perfect at displaying the spectacle at hand. I went a little overboard with this review but I think that it perfectly encapsulate how I feel about the movie.

10 out of 10

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